Nvidia Lawyer's Email Preceded Megaspeed Probe Shift to DOJ

The U.S. Commerce Department's investigation into Megaspeed, the Singapore data-center firm suspected of diverting billions of dollars of Nvidia AI hardware to China, was handed to the Justice Department after Nvidia's own general counsel emailed the agents working the case, according to a report in The New York Times.

In August 2025, Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter contacted Commerce investigators seeking information about the inquiry. His email said Jeff Kessler, a senior Commerce official who reports to Secretary Howard Lutnick, had given Nvidia permission to reach out. The investigators declined to meet.

The contact alone was enough to unsettle Commerce. Internal discussions raised concerns that the department's interactions with Nvidia could compromise the case, and the Justice Department then asked Commerce to pause its work and transferred the matter into a criminal inquiry. Officials described the handoff as unusual.

According to a Commerce official cited by the Times, Kessler "did not direct investigators to share information with Nvidia or intervene in their investigative decisions." The mere invocation of his name in an email about an active investigation, per the reporting summarized by The Next Web, was enough to trigger the transfer.

Megaspeed, spun off from a Chinese gaming firm in 2023, sits at the center of the broader Nvidia-China storyline we have been tracking. Its Malaysian affiliate acquired at least $4.8 billion of Nvidia-powered hardware between June 2024 and February 2026, and inspectors found Nvidia systems still sealed inside shipping crates at a Malaysian facility, raising suspicions the equipment was staged for transit rather than local deployment. Nvidia maintains it has accounted for every deployed GPU and that no diversion has been proven.